Most
Park Morton Apartment residents in Washington, D.C. rank illegal drugs as the
main problem in their neighborhood. They view child abuse and neglect, domestic
violence, school failure, many mental and physical health deficiencies, and the
bulk of the housing code and criminal violations at Park Morton as growing out
of the illegal drug problem. Common housing code violations at the Park Morton
Apartments are: vermin infestation, defective plumbing, including toilets that
overflow after use, non-functioning door and window locks, broken electrical
connections and electrical boxes that overheat and create a danger of fire,
ceilings that have caved in, holes in walls, water leaks, overcrowding of
apartments (too many children in a single bedroom), and different sex children
in the same bedroom. Criminal violations include theft, robbery, prostitution,
gunshots, disorderly conduct, assaults and traffic violations.

To
help solve the illegal drug problem, the residents have called the police and
have tried to install high intensity, bullet-proof lighting, restricted
outsiders to common areas via no-trespass signs, taught their children the
addictive nature of drugs and kept them indoors and away from hallways and
public spaces. Some have tried to escape the problem by getting Section 8
certificates or paying high rents to move to the suburbs.

These
measures help reduce, if not solve the problem. Some residents believe that
reduction of the problem, even when it is achieved, is not enough. Illegal
drugs are not inevitable. Even in the U.S., in relatively recent times, illegal
drugs have been eliminated. During World War II, the security measures designed
to prevent infiltration of foreign spies and sabotage to naval installations,
made smuggling into the U.S. virtually impossible. Most American addicts were
forced to break their habits during the war and consumer demand just about
disappeared.[1] At the end of the war the Federal Bureau
of Narcotics reported there were only 20,000 addicts in all of the U.S.[2] After the war the number of drug addicts
rose to 500,000 addicts, which was reduced to 200,000 in the mid-1970s by the
efforts of the Drug Enforcement Administration.[3] Global production of opium, 70% of which
was from Southeast Asia, fluctuated from 7,600 tons after the war to 1,000 tons
by 1970 and to 4,200 tons by 1990.

Cuba. The best examples of where illegal
drugs have been eliminated are where working people have taken power, as in
Cuba. With their overthrow of the profit system in 1959 the Cubans freed
themselves from organized crime and the drug dealers.[4] The drug trade was eliminated by
providing jobs, education and counseling to the addicted and by repression of
the distributors. Alfred McCoy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin,
described the drug situation in Cuba prior to the 1959 communist revolution:

Organized crime was welcome in
prerevolutionary Cuba and Havana was probably the most important transit point
forLucky Luciano's European heroin shipments.
The leaders of Luciano's heroin syndicate were at home in the Cuban capital and
regarded it as a "safe city." Meyer Lansky owned most of the city's
casinos and the Santo Trafficante Jr. family served as Lansky's resident
managers in Havana.[5]

The
Cuban Revolution forced Traficante to write off his Havana casino operations as
a lose. But he was partially compensated by the flood of Cuban refuges to
Miami. His association with Cuban gangsters and politicians when he was living
in Havana enabled him to expand his control over the Florida bolita lottery, a
Cuban numbers game. When the pope visited Cuba on January 21, 1998, Fidel
Castro in his welcoming statement, mentioned the problem of illegal drugs and
many other problems of concern to working people, which communist Cuba had
ameliorated:

In your long pilgrimage around the world,
you would have been able to see with your own eyes many injustices,
inequalities and poverty; uncultivated lands and landless hungry farmers;
unemployment, hunger, illness; lives that could be saved with little money,
being lost for lack of it; illiteracy, child prostitution, 6-year old children
working or begging for alms to survive; shanty towns where hundreds of millions
live in unworthy conditions; race and sex discrimination; complete ethnic
groups evicted from their lands and abandoned to their fate; xenophobia,
contempt for other peoples; cultures which have been, or are currently being,
destroyed; underdevelopment and usurious loans, unpayable and uncollectable
debts, unfair exchange, outrageous and unproductive financial speculations; an
environment being ruthlessly and perhaps helplessly destroyed; an unscrupulous
weapons trade with disgusting lucrative intents; wars, violence, massacres;
generalized corruption, narcotics, vices and an alienating consumerism imposed
on peoples as an ideal model. . .

What can we offer you in Cuba? People
exposed to less inequalities and a lower number of helpless citizens; less
children without schools, less patients without hospitals, and more teachers
and physicians per capita than any other country in the world visited by the
Holy Father; educated people you can talk to in perfect freedom with the
certainty of their talent and their high political culture, their strong
convictions and absolute confidence in their ideas; people that will show all
due respect and consciousness in listening to you. Another country will not be
found better disposed to understand your felicitous idea--as we understand it
and so similar to what we preach--that the equitable distribution of wealth and
solidarity among men and peoples should be globalized. Welcome to Cuba!

Vietnam. Similarly in Vietnam illegal
drugs were eliminated when the working people won power, first in the north in
1954 and in the south after 1973. In the 1940s Ho Chi Minh complained that for
three centuries plantation workers, miners and urban laborers had been spending
their entire wages in Indochina's 2,500 state-licensed opium dens. This hurt
their families and their class and it strengthened the colonial governments.[6] The French in Saigon, the British in
Burma, Malaya and Siam and the Dutch in the Indies promoted drug addiction in
their colonies because the licensed opium dens gave tax revenues. In some
colonies opium revenues provided 60% of the taxes for road, canal and rail
construction.[7]

The
elimination of illegal drugs in Vietnam was aided by the Chinese Revolution.
Within ten years after the end of World War II, Southeast Asia was cut off from
foreign opium. The Chinese People's Liberation Army, after winning the civil
war, drove Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist Army out of Yunnan Province. Yunnan
was China's second largest opium grower and much of its poppy harvest had been
smuggled into Southeast Asia. When the People's Liberation Army began
patrolling the border in the early 1950s to prevent an expected counterattack
by CIA-supported Nationalist Chinese troops, most opium caravans were halted.
By the mid-1950s People's Republic agriculturalists and party workers had
introduced substitute crops and any possible opium seepage into Southeast Asia
ceased.[8] A report produced by the U.S. Army in
1971 testified to Vietnam's elimination of illegal drugs:

The opium-growing areas of North Vietnam
are concentrated in the mountainous northern provinces bordering China.
Cultivation is closely controlled by the government and none of the crop is
believed to be channeled illicitly into internal markets. Much of it is
probably converted into morphine and used for medical purposes.[9]

Communist Vietnam eliminated illegal
drugs, but the U.S. Army in 1971 accused the U.S. puppet government of South
Vietnam of pushing drugs.[10]

China. The Chinese Revolution helped
eliminate illegal drugs in Vietnam and it also ended a long history of drug
trafficking in China.[11] As early as 1650 the Dutch were
exporting shipments of Indian opium to China totaling more than 50 tons/year.
The Dutch introduced the smoking of opium in a tobacco pipe, which increased
the drug's use among the Chinese. The Chinese government in 1729 prohibited
opium use. However, British capital evaded the prohibition. In the 1770s, the
British East India Company took control of the export of Indian opium to China.[12] In the first half of the 19th century,
with the British exporting 3,200 tons of Indian opium to China per year, one
quarter of the Chinese male population were opium smokers.[13] Chinese resistance to the British opium
trade resulted in the First and Second Opium Wars (1840-1842 and 1856-1860). In
the first war the Ch'ing dynasty refused to utilize the support of the people
in the struggle against the aggressors and capitulated. In the second war
British and French capital took advantage of the civil war which was underway
(the T'ai P'ing Rebellion) in October 1856 to seize ports and turn the country
into a semi-colony. By 1900 China's population of 400 million included 13.5
million opium addicts who consumed 39,000 tons of smoking opium annually.[14]

When
the communists took over in 1949, China's 40 million addict population was the
largest in the world.[15] The working class attack on illegal
drugs began with a detoxification program that eliminated the demand. Addicts
were sent to local drug clinics where opium was denounced as an
"imperialist and capitalist activity." Those who persisted in their
addiction were subjected to the criminal justice system and sent to labor
camps.[16] Through the process of land reform,
extensive poppy fields were reclaimed for food production and further opium
cultivation was banned under regulations approved at the state administrative
council in February 1950.[17] Historian Jack Chen summarized the
Chinese effort at elimination of illegal drugs:

The drive against drugs began in much the
same way as in all such campaigns--with a thorough investigation. As Mao says:
"No investigation, no right to talk." That concluded, it was decided
that the man who took dope, mostly opium, an easy drug to trace because of its
odor, was considered less a criminal or evil doer than a victim of the drug
pusher and the foreign powers which had pushed the drugs down the throats of an
unwilling people, the better to enslave them. Treatment was then given, mainly
"cold turkey" withdrawal which though hard to endure, was swift,
effective and cheap. The weight of the law fell on the pushers, the exploiters
who made money out of the traffic. These might be jailed for lawbreaking, but
here too the emphasis, as in all such cases, was on reform and rehabilitation,
on convincing the wrongdoer that he was indeed doing wrong, explaining why his
wrongdoing was antisocial, and getting him to decide himself to mend his ways.

This problem was swiftly solved because
of the curious fact that the former main culprits, the foreign powers, were now
actually assisting the antidrug campaign in a negative way by their embargo on
all trade with China. With the virtual ending of foreign trade with the
capitalist countries no new shipments of drugs came to China and none went out.
Inside China it was a relatively simple task to end the planting of the opium
poppy. With the advance of cooperation to every farm area in the country it
became virtually impossible for any farmer to plant flamboyant poppy fields
without his neighbors knowing. Such was the efficacy of the mass line.

Within a few years by such means Peking
became a city without prostitution, without beggary, without drugs or organized
crime. After a couple of false starts even the Tungtan Market stall-holders
gave up haggling and established strictly fixed prices and fair practices. Mass
social education and action was indeed paying off.[18]

Economic and Psychological Foundation.
The illegal drug problem has both a push (drug profiteers) and pull (the
consumer) aspect. What kills the drug profiteers in the communist countries is
the same thing that kills other aspects of the profit system: the establishment
of a politically viable planned economy and a society that is labor dominated.
Under working class rule nutrition, health, housing, transportation, education,
and recreation essentially become free and rationed. For example, in the
Russian federation, starting in 1928 the legislature set 9 square meters (97
sq. ft.) as the "minimum sanitary standard per person of living
space" toward which government planning would aim. When the 9 sq. meter
mark was achieved in the 1960s, it was raised upward to 15 sq.m. per person.[19] During the period from 1928 to 1960 the
maximum size of the basic three-room apartment that could be constructed was
restricted to 60 sq.m. This rented for less than $5 per month (one percent of
income). No matter how much money a recording artist or author or inventor or
black market profiteer might accumulate, they lived in the basic three room
apartments because that was all that could be built. The units could not be
sold or subleased. So there were no landlords.

The
great complaint of profiteers under communism is that their gains are good for
nothing. With housing rationed and free and the same dimensions for all, money
cannot buy anything larger. Similarly, with education and health care free at
all levels, money is useless. Drug dealing and organized crime do not prosper
in communist countries for the same reason that capitalist dealing does not
prosper. When money is worthless, those inclined toward profit have an
obstacle. That is why organized crime, no less than capitalism, opposes
communism.

Communist
society provides the economic and psychological basis for discouraging both the
profit push of illegal drugs and the consumer pull. Why do some working people in
capitalist countries engage in compulsive, self-destructive activity, such as
drug abuse, gambling, alcoholism, tobacco, sexual promiscuity, gluttony,
escapist religion, envy, money borrowing, and consumption of luxury goods
(expensive cars, houses, clothing and vacations). The reason in part is because
capitalism teaches the gospel of mindless consumerism. People are encouraged to
value themselves by what they consume. Victimized are the emotionally unstable,
those without impulse control, the youth, the mentally immature and those
without positive social attitudes and education. Consumerism is used to fill
the spiritual void that is basic to the profit system. The purpose of the
capitalist media is not truth but to promote consumption. Movie and sports stars,
journalists and culture in general are little more than sellers of advertising.
The purpose of capitalist housing is not shelter, but profit. Some people have
more than enough space while others have little or nothing. The purpose of
capitalist transportation is similarly perverted for profit. While some go in
luxury, others, if they are lucky, have inadequate, dangerous and expensive
public transportation.

Under
communism, one's value is based on labor. All are workers. Food, clothing and
other necessities are distributed according to the golden rule, which
translates into distribution according to need. Media, culture, religion, sex,
food, clothing and shelter are not for profit. Mindless consumption is not made
the purpose of life. In communist society both the push and pull for self
destructive activity is reduced. Problems such as illegal drugs, unequal
distribution of housing, education and transportation are relatively easy to
solve under working class rule. Other problems such as alcohol and tobacco
abuse need attention. One billion (25%) of the world's 4 billion population
smoke tobacco. Eighty-five percent of the smokers are male, 15% are female. The
World Health Organization recommends that all nations establish label warnings,
smokeless areas in the workplace, stop sales to youth and bar it from public
congregating areas.

Conclusion. Illegal drugs and the
problems associated with them are not inevitable. U.S. and world history
provide examples of where they have been eliminated. In combating the drug
problem, Park Morton residents have called the police and participated in their
tenants association. Some have also addressed the bigger picture in order to
better combat the illegal drugs. They subscribe to and read the communist
newspaper, People's Weekly World.
They attend the meetings of the Frederick Douglass Club, which is the
neighborhood branch of the Communist party or they have joined the Communist
party. Comrade Dextan at 202is the
organizer at Park Morton. The Communist party has proved an efficient tool
throughout much of the world in solving the drug problem. The present U.S.
system is dominated by the profit makers. Only by addressing both the smaller
and larger picture can a decent society be constructed to replace capitalism.